Josh Barrett who runs the great iPad for lawyers site Tablet Legal reminded me that a year ago, he and I posted statistics on how people were accessing our websites, inspired by a similar post by John Gruber on his Daring Fireball site. Given the rise in popularity of the iPad over the last year, Josh thought it would be interesting to see what the numbers look like now. Here are my updated stats, and Josh is running a similar post today.
A year ago, 56% of people accessing iPhone J.D. used Windows, 26% used a Mac, 13% used an iPhone and under 3% used an iPad. Here are my numbers from the past 30 days:
| OS | Percentage |
|---|---|
| Windows | 52.98 |
| Macintosh | 21.80 |
| iPhone | 14.98 |
| iPad | 7.82 |
| Android | 0.84 |
| Linux | 0.57 |
| iPod | 0.43 |
| (not set) | 0.35 |
| BlackBerry | 0.16 |
| FreeBSD | 0.03 |
If you find it easier to review a picture than a table, here is the same info in a pie chart. Windows is blue, Mac is green, iPhone is Red, and iPad is the larger yellow slice:
So how do these numbers compare to last year? The big change was the increase in use of the iPad and to a lesser degree, the iPhone. Around 8% of iPhone J.D. readers who had been using a PC or a Mac to access this website are now instead using an iPad, or in some cases an iPhone. Not a major shift, but still an interesting change that matches my experience in the real world, where I see more attorneys using an iPad.
Just looking at iPad and iPhone use as a percentage of devices used to access iPhone J.D., here are the monthly trends that I've seen over the last year:
There was a big spike in iPhone and iPad users in mid-2010, but that was an anomaly. On June 30, 2010, I posted a tip about creating a folder on the iPhone with an Apple logo, John Gruber linked to my post that same day, about 40,000 of his readers came to iPhone J.D. to read that post, and apparently a high percentage of his audience was using an iPhone or iPad at the time. If you ignore that spike, you see a slight increase in access to this website from iPhones since January of 2010 and a more substantial increase in access to this website from iPads over that time period.
The numbers that Josh Barrett is posting on Tablet Legal today are in some ways different from mine. The biggest change he saw was a smaller percentage of folks using a Mac and a larger percentage of folks using a PC. That makes sense because most attorneys use PCs, so as more attorneys are reading his site at their office, he is seeing more views from PC users. But on the iPad and iPhone front, his results are similar to mine; a small increase in access from iPhones, and a larger increase in access from iPads.
How representative are iPhone J.D. and Tablet Legal readers of any larger population group? Who knows. But I do know that my core audience is attorneys who use the iPhone, and these statistics provide additional evidence that over the last 14 months, more and more attorneys using iPhones have started using iPads.
